Long unavailable on CD, Pentatone have restored and released Leonard Bernstein’s 1973 recording with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra of Bizet’s immortal Carmen. Marilyn Horne may not be everyone’s idea of Carmen, but her mezzo is luxurious, her characterization sharply defined and her star quality dominant throughout. James McCracken’s Don José is massively sung, his naturally craggy voice suggesting imminent emotional crisis, and he and Horne together spell danger in each encounter, ending in a particularly vicious finale. Adriana Maliponte is a vibrant Micaela and Tom Krause has all the swagger Escamillo needs. Yet for all the various strengths of its cast, this remains Bernstein’s Carmen: expansive, theatrical and provocatively paced, this Carmen leaps from the speakers and affords an immersive experience. For me, this is the most consistently satisfying recording of the opera yet committed to disc.

Diana Damrau –Fiamma del belcanto (Warner)

Diana Damrau has nailed her colours to the mast here. Near enough unparalleled in bel canto repertory (she returns to Covent Garden in 2015/16 to sing Lucia di Lammermoor), she is in magnificent voice throughout this new recital, confidently in control and able to offer a multifaceted performance on each and every track. We expect Damrau to have all the goods when it comes to florid singing, and she does not disappoint in excerpts from Donizetti and Bellini – her Maria Stuarda would be something to experience in the theatre, if her rendition of the opening aria is an indication of the depth she would bring to it. As experienced at the ROH, her Violetta (La traviata) is complex and courageous, but I was surprised to come away from this disc most touched by her Mimì (La bohème) and Nedda (Pagliacci), both sung with disarming simplicity, and neither role associated with her. A very fine recital from one of our best artists.

As The Royal Opera announces the continuation of its Orpheus myth-inspired programming, Deutsche Harmonia Mundi has put out this timely release covering music from early operas on the same theme. Led by Nicolas Achten (who plays both harp and theorbo as well as providing much of the vocal content), Scherzi Musicali are completely involved and involving in this repertory, creating a vibrant and authentic musical world, evocatively re-creating the sound of opera during its formative years in the early 1600s. To the forefront is of course a selection from Monteverdi’s great La favola d’Orfeo, but the other excerpts taken from operas by Monteverdi’s contemporaries — Rossi, Merula, De’Cavalieri and Peri — are no less exquisite. Intelligently grouped to allow the legend to follow its course, and with excellent performances from soprano Deborah York, this is an exceptional journey through some of opera’s earliest moments.

The most celebrated young poet in England at the time, W.H. Auden had controversially emigrated to America in January 1939. The writer felt he had come to an impasse both in his poetic career and in his personal life, and he sought new beginnings. America was famous for such opportunities, as he told Louis MacNeice: 'In England today the artist feels essentially lonely, twisted in dying roots…in America, he is just lonely, but so… is everybody else.’

When Germany invaded Poland that year, Auden wrote one of his most scathing poems, September 1, 1939. A thematic precursor to The Age of Anxiety, with the poet sitting in ‘one of the dives’ on 52nd Street, it identified the ‘waves of anger and fear’ across the world as symptomatic of more than the threat of another world war: this anger and fear, he wrote, was ‘obsessing our private lives’.

Auden began writing The Age of Anxiety during wartime, in July 1944. ‘When the historical process breaks down’, begins the poem’s prose prologue, ‘and armies organize with their embossed debates the ensuing void which they can never consecrate, when necessity is associated with horror and freedom with boredom, then it looks good for the bar business’.

While The Age of Anxiety is an obscure, challenging and – ultimately – enormously rewarding read. Its scenario is nevertheless quite simple and mundane. Four ordinary, lonely, unacquainted people – Quant, an ageing Irish businessman; Malin, a retired medical officer in the Canadian Air Force; Rosetta, a Jewish buyer for a department store; and Emble, a handsome teenage naval recruit – get drunk in a bar in New York during wartime.

When The Age of Anxiety was published in 1947, many thought Auden had characterized the times: he had given a name to the confusion and concern of a paranoid world reeling from the international disaster of World War II. But ‘the age of anxiety’ is as much an acknowledgment of personal limitation – the precarious co-existence of freedom and necessity, the perpetual interplay of boredom and horror, which can only be navigated by embracing our shared humanity.

Leonard Bernstein read the poem in the summer of 1947, finding it ‘fascinating and hair-raising’ and ‘one of the most shattering examples of pure virtuosity in the history of British poetry.’ By his own report the composition of a symphony took on an almost compulsive quality, and he worked on it steadily for the next two years, finally completing it in New York in March 1949 and playing piano when the work had its premiere on 8 April.

Bernstein’s outline of the symphony shows how faithful he was to the poem. A short prologue begins Part I, finding the four characters alone, then drawn together by a common urge – a ‘lonely improvisation by two clarinets, echo-tone’ before a long descending scale takes them into the unconscious realm.

Auden’s seven ages – where the characters discuss the progress of human history – are a series of seven variations, each introducing ‘some counter-feature upon which the next variation seizes’ in a sort of ‘musical fission’. Similarly, the seven stages – a symbolic dream journey in which the characters travel through their individual and collective unconscious – are seven more variations as the four try all means of homecoming, singly, in pairs, exchanging partners, ‘always missing the objective’ awakening to a shared experience of their humanity, and inebriation.

Part II begins with the ‘Dirge’ as the characters mourn the loss of the ‘colossal father’, and a contrasting middle section ‘in which can be felt the self-indulgent, or negative, aspect of this strangely pompous lamentation’. The ‘Masque’ is a scherzo for piano and percussion with ‘a kind of fantastic piano-jazz’ ending in anti-climax with four bars of ‘hectic jazz’. When the orchestra stops, a pianino continues with waning energy: a separation of the self from the guilt of escapist living, the solo-piano protagonist free again to examine what is left beneath the emptiness.

This is an extract from Will Richmond's article 'Affirmative Gestures' in The Royal Ballet's programme book, available during performances and from the ROH Shop.

The Age of Anxiety appears in The Royal Ballet's mixed programme with Ceremony of Innocence and Aeternum and runs from 7–17 November 2014. Tickets are still available.

The programme is given with generous philanthropic support from Richard and Delia Baker (Ceremony of Innocence) Simon and Virginia Robertson, Kenneth and Susan Green, Karl and Holly Peterson, The Age of Anxiety Production Syndicate, the Friends of Covent Garden and an anonymous donor (The Age of Anxiety) and The Royal Opera House Endowment Fund.

Encountering YouthKim Brandstrup created his Ceremony of Innocence for Royal Ballet dancers at the Aldeburgh Festival in Benjamin Britten’s centenary year. The ballet tracks an imagined meeting between a man and his childhood self, through which Brandstrup examines the impact of the passing of youth and innocence. His choreography seeks to capture the artistic conflict of striving to ‘re-create what is missing, lost, absent, not there anymore'.

Brandstrup and BrittenBrandstrup used Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, a relatively early work and often considered his arrival into maturity as a composer. Brandstrup first choreographed to Britten’s music for a 1992 production of Death in Venice, his final opera. Though the pieces are from opposite ends of Britten’s output, Brandstrup identifies strong musical and thematic links between Death in Venice and Variations, of loss and longing for youth – which are reflected in Ceremony of Innocence.

'We Would Rather Be Ruined Than Changed'The Age of Anxiety is Royal Ballet Artist in Residence Liam Scarlett’s second narrative work for the Royal Opera House main stage. His starting point was Leonard Bernstein’s Symphony no.2, ‘The Age of Anxiety’, which itself was inspired by W.H. Auden’s 1947 poem of the same name. Scarlett’s ballet follows Auden’s four protagonists on an evening of drunken excesses, as they search for identity in an evolving world.

Inspired CreationFor Scarlett, dancers play a central role in the creation and interpretation of his choreography – he says that 'Making a ballet is all about specific dancers'. For Age of Anxiety he has selected two small casts that include performers from across the ranks of The Royal Ballet. He’s tailored his selection to fit Auden's characters, who are 'fairly defined in terms of substance and background', while at the same time encouraging the dancers to allow their roles to 'come from within'.

Sinfonia da RequiemLike Brandstrup, Christopher Wheeldon has a longstanding affinity with the music of Britten. He first fell in love with Britten’s music early in his career, dancing with The Royal Ballet as Kenneth MacMillan created his version of The Prince of the Pagodas. For Aeternum, he selected the composer’s Sinfonia da Requiem– a harrowing memorial symphony to Britten’s parents, and a cry against the horrors of war. Taking his inspiration from the score, Wheeldon’s ballet addresses the fear, terror and pain of loss, but ends with a sense of optimism to match what he describes as the 'light-filled' final movement.

Building a BattlefieldWheeldon's choice of designer for Aeternum was regular collaborator Jean-Marc Puissant, who for Wheeldon 'always brings an interesting modern look and contemporary sensibility to his designs'. Puissant's striking, abstract setting for Aeternum, built around a towering, mobile wooden structure, provides the perfect setting for Wheeldon's vivid choreography. The ballet won the 2013 Olivier Award for Best New Dance Production.

The programme is given with generous philanthropic support from Richard and Delia Baker (Ceremony of Innocence) Simon and Virginia Robertson, Kenneth and Susan Green, Karl and Holly Peterson, The Age of Anxiety Production Syndicate, the Friends of Covent Garden and an anonymous donor (The Age of Anxiety) and The Royal Opera House Endowment Fund.

‘American Dream, American Dream’, sings Anna Nicole in Mark-Anthony Turnage’s opera, ‘I’m gonna rape that goddamn American dream, I’m gonna tear it open and lap up the cream’. It's one of many operas that question the American Dream, in which anyone with ambition, talent and a strong work ethic can achieve fame and fortune – and ask how desirable or attainable that dream really is:

Giacomo Puccini's La fanciulla del West examines American ways of life both good and bad. The corrupt sheriff Jack Rance and the homesick miners trapped in California by their desire to make a quick fortune demonstrate the dangers of a society that places great value on money and social status. But Puccini's heroine Minnie has typically ‘American’ virtues: bravery, honesty and a sense of adventure. Ultimately, Minnie’s integrity gives her the courage to reject conventional dreams of financial and social success and leave California for a new life with her lover Dick Johnson.

Benjamin Britten and W.H. Auden created an optimistic vision of American society in Paul Bunyan, which celebrates the same pioneering spirit that makes Puccini’s Minnie so likeable. The gentle giant Paul Bunyan brings together a community of lumberjacks to tame the ‘virgin forest’ of America, and later helps them to find work as farmers, manual labourers and businessmen. In this cheerful operetta, America is seen as a land of exciting opportunities (one or two satirical snipes from Auden aside).

Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht on the other hand, took a far darker view, making America a byword for greed and corruption. In 1931's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, three criminals found a city in the American desert devoted to hedonism and financial profit. The consumerist paradise soon becomes a hotbed of corruption and inhumanity. The hero Jimmy is condemned to death for being unable to pay a bar bill. When he appeals to God the people tell him that God cannot punish them – they are already in Hell.

Other operas show how America’s opportunities are not available to everyone. Rose Maurrant, the blue-collar heroine of Weill’s Street Scene, knows that her boss’s promises to help her ‘sing on Broadway’ will come to nothing. She and her poet boyfriend Sam Kaplan nourish ambitions to escape their humdrum existence, but even this dream is denied when Rose's father murders her mother. In George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, the African-American community of Catfish Row is condemned to perpetual poverty due to racial prejudice. Love can flourish (like the tender passion between Porgy and Bess), but the only character to profit financially in this ghetto is the drug-dealer Sportin’ Life, who eventually lures Bess away with the promise of a glamorous life in New York.

Later in the 20th century, composers questioned whether the American Dream is desirable even if achieved. Leonard Bernstein portrayed the boredom of comfortable American suburbia and the claustrophobia of the prosperous middle-class family in Trouble in Tahiti and A Quiet Place– having explored racial prejudice and gang warfare in his hit Romeo and Juliet-inspired musical West Side Story. Stewart Wallace's Harvey Milktells the true story of a politician who longs for ‘an American Dream without prejudice’ but is assassinated for his beliefs. And the title character of Nixon in China and J. Robert Oppenheimer in Doctor Atomic, at one point seen as icons of the American success story, are depicted by John Adams as tormented souls plagued with self-doubt.

Anna Nicole runs from 11–24 September 2014. Tickets are still available.The first performance is open to students only, with tickets priced £1–£25. Find out more about ROH Students. ROH Students is generously made possible by the Bunting Family and Simon Robey.

Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny is staged with generous philanthropic support from The Kurt Weill Foundation for Music, Inc., New York, NY, Stefan Sten Olsson, Richard and Ginny Salter, Hamish and Sophie Forsyth and The Royal Opera Circle.

When British audiences think of American ballet, the name that naturally comes to mind is that of the ‘father of American ballet’, George Balanchine. While many will have heard of his successor, Jerome Robbins, the extent of this choreographer’s immense contribution to the history of American dance, and to ballet generally, is not always understood.

Robbins was born Jerome Rabinowitz in 1918, and raised in New Jersey. He began his professional career as a dancer, performing in Broadway shows and then with Ballet Theater (the company that was to become American Ballet Theatre). By the time he turned 25, many leading choreographers – including Balanchine, Leonid Massine and Michel Fokine – had noted his potential and created roles for him, the most celebrated of which was Fokine’s Petrushka. But, in spite of his success, Robbins felt a sense of disconnection from the repertory he was performing – ‘Why can’t we dance about American subjects?’ he once asked. Already a keen choreographer, he recruited a small group of dancers, commissioned a score from the then little-known composer, Leonard Bernstein, and created his first ballet, Fancy Free,in1944. The work, which combined elements of classical ballet and jazz to tell the story of three young sailors on shore leave, was an instant hit, receiving 22 curtain calls at its first performance and catapulting Robbins to fame.

Over the next five decades, he won great acclaim as a choreographer and director. In a run of musicals for stage and screen, which included On the Town(1944), The King and I(stage, 1951; film, 1956), West Side Story(stage, 1957; film, 1961), Gypsy (1959) and Fiddler on the Roof(1964), he revolutionized the genre, moving away from the tradition of set dance pieces and instead integrating his choreography seamlessly with storylines, and using it to express the relationships between characters. This, as well as his tendency to choose subjects that addressed the lives and concerns of ordinary Americans won over audiences and critics alike. Robbins received a plethora of awards for his work on Broadway and film, including four Tony Awards, two Oscars, five Donaldsons and an Emmy.

At the same time, he became the first American to build an international reputation and an enduring legacy as a ballet choreographer. Following Fancy Free, he created series of short ballets on modern subjects for Ballet Theater. He left the company in 1948 to join New York City Ballet, where he became Associate Artistic Director the following year and stayed – apart from a few years out to explore experimental music theatre techniques – until the end of his career. Inspired by the NYCB's founder, his idol Balanchine, Robbins began to create increasingly abstract ballets that nevertheless retained his signature blend of dance styles and portrayed the intricacies of human interactions. From the sensitive, sensual Afternoon of a Faun (1953) to the Chopin ballets – including his wonderful comedy The Concert – and later works such the energetic, postmodern Glass Pieces with music by Philip Glass, each Robbins ballet has a unique and brilliant character.

Life was not always easy for the choreographer. In spite of his tremendous success, he was a perfectionist who was never completely satisfied with his work. He was also a hard taskmaster, which meant that he wasn’t always popular; on one occasion his dancers for Billion Dollar Baby watched in silence as Robbins, walking backwards while delivering a tirade, fell into the orchestra pit. There were difficulties in Robbins’s personal life, too, including the immense guilt he felt after naming Communist Party members during the McCarthy witch-hunts of the 1950s.

Perhaps, however, such troubles helped him to understand and connect with the lives and concerns of ordinary Americans. Balanchine once said to the ballerina Violette Verdy that ‘the real American choreographer is Jerry, not me’; coming from the man regarded by many as the greatest choreographer of the 20th century, there could hardly be a greater endorsement of Robbins’ work, and of his powerful influence on the traditions, style and popularity of American ballet.